The principle sponsors of Wyden-Bennett, the healthcare reform bill I’ve been touting here for some time, Ron Wyden, Democrat from Oregon, and Robert Bennett, Republican from Utah, have taken to the pages of the Washington Post to press the case for their plan which achieves universal coverage, cuts healthcare spending, and has bipartisan support:
We refuse to let partisanship kill health reform — and we are proof that it doesn’t have to.
As 12 U.S. senators from both sides of the aisle who have widely varying philosophies, we offer a concrete demonstration that it is possible to find common ground and pass real health reform this year. The process has been rocky, and slower than many had hoped. But the reports of the death of bipartisan health reform have been greatly exaggerated. Now is the time to resuscitate it, before the best opportunity in years is wasted.
Democratic activists have long campaigned for universal coverage and quality benefits. Republican activists zero in on empowering individuals and bringing market forces to the health-care system. Our approach does both. In our discussions on the Healthy Americans Act, each side gave a bit on some of its visions of perfect health reform to achieve bipartisanship.
Read the whole thing.
If senators want scalps to hang from their belts when they go home to stump for re-election, they’ll keep pressing the same, tired, ineffective approaches that are being argued about in the Congress, on the editorial pages of the country’s newspapers, and in blogs right now. If they want to solve problems, they’ll adopt an approach that actually has some hope of addressing the problems and Wyden-Bennett does.
One more word: if the Congressional majority elects to shove their preferred approach down the throats of the recalcitrant minority with a bill that has little or no Republican support, there can be no stronger argument for a tyranny of the majority the next time Democrats are in the minority. There is no such thing as a permanent majority.
The problem with Wyden-Bennett, as Matt Yglesias points out (http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/08/the-wyden-bennett-mirage.php), is that there’s no real bipartisan support for it. From a purely political perspecitive, why should Democrats support what from their perspective is a compromise bill when Republicans don’t really support it.
I, too, prefer Wyden-Bennett, but, like carbon taxes as my preferred solution to AGW, it has no real political support.
I may be naive here but it seems to me that the solution to lack of political support is to build political support. Just a thought.
I have noticed that some conservatives are opposed to the individual mandate, which is regarded as an infringement on liberty. This issue has been bothering me all week, because I am not sure how I feel about it. The right to lack any health insurance coverage does not seem to me to be all that valuable. Dr. Krauthammer has been stating that young, healthy Americans who forgo purchasing health insurance are making a completely rational decision which should be respected. I am not sure I agree with this, since even young, healthy people can get sick. On the other hand, I can appreciate that government coercion is inherently undesirable.
I came up with an idea today that might achieve the same goal as the individual mandate without coercion. Basically, if forcing people to obtain health insurance coverage is un-American, then then how about bribing them? The government could use the savings from eliminating the Medicaid program, and the revenue from ending the tax-exemption for employer-provided health insurance, in order to provide cash payments to individuals with which to purchase health insurance. If an individual chose an inexpensive plan, she could “keep the change”, so she would have a clear and simple incentive to choose a cheaper plan. But the individual would not receive any of the cash until she had enrolled in a health insurance plan of her choice.
Of course my proposal relies on taxpayer money, and taxes are obviously another form of government coercion. But I don’t see how universal health insurance coverage can be achieved without some form of coercion, and I still think that universal health insurance coverage is a worthy goal.
Obamacare promises to make health insurance mandates universal without making health care universal. There are hundreds of thousands of Amerikan expatriates (and tourists besides) who will be obligated to pay insurance premiums without receiving health care or even drugs while they are overseas.
It’s an idiotic statement, because by law they are allowed to receive emergency care regardless of ability to pay, so if they get a serious injury or illness (and it can happen, even to young people who think they’re invulnerable), that basically turns these people into free-riders. The burden of their treatment falls on the hospital (and often the state), unless the hospital can squeeze money out of them.
That’s why you need the mandate – so they can’t choose to be potential free-riders. Any broad health care reform that doesn’t involve either a mandate to have insurance or universal insurance is frankly a joke because of this.
Right, that is what the President has tried to do with the current abortions that are being dignified as health care reform legislation. He’ll go on television and use the bully pulpit and jaw bone for those stinkers, but an actual bill that is much better…no way!
Like I’ve said for quite some time, politicians do what is politically expedient, not what is right. This is why they are utterly contemptible people.
Brett,
Yes Brett, but the logic is still totally and completely rational. Being a free rider is not an irrational act, it is a rational act. The problem of free riding in this case, by the way, is a product of the laws and regulations–i.e. the government.
However….in looking at other areas of insurance mandantory laws requiring minimal levels of insurance aren’t aimed at these people (the low risk types) its aimed precisely at the high risk people. Further, these high risk types are subsidized.
Insurance companies can find out who is high risk and who is low, and price accordingly. The problem is that many people have decided that outcome is not a good one and want to force the insurance companies to cover such people. Considering that this can reduce profits, push up premiums for the low risk types, and so forth it is a bit of a problem. The claims of adverse selection, based on the empirical research, appear to be over-blown. Perhaps wildly so.
My own experience of insurance companies, as someone who’s had them as clients for many years, is that adverse selection is being exaggerated. Moreover, I think that adverse selection as an explanation for the high cost of health insurance fails the rule of parsimony.
A much simpler explanation is that healthcare insurance is necessarily proportional to the cost of healthcare.
However, I’m willing to accept it as an explanation for some fraction of the costs, just as I’m willing to acknowledge excess demand as part of the problem. However, even if you eliminate adverse selection as a cost component and reduce excess demand as far as is practicable consistent with public health, I’m still skeptical that it explains why we spend three times as much per capita as most OECD countries.
It can’t possibly be insurance administrative costs: the difference in those costs between Canada (a single-payer system) and the United States is only fractional. Our costs are a multiple of those in France or Germany.